One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By effect of the enemy's shells you judge what the effect of yours must be. Months of experience have done away with all theories and practice has become much the same by either adversary. For example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft gun-fire and the guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any rate, you may get a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being killed.
By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer, whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately the calibre.
A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt, and after the second's delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam in the distance on a winter day, came the sound of the burst. The next was over. With the third the "heavy stuff" ought to be right on.
But don't forget that there was also an order for some "Right stuff," identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working-party as it hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth—not exactly on. Exactly on is the way that British gunners like to fill an order f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.
Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards' range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where they should.
No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting, who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a gunner unless you are. Any "good-enough" temperament is ruled off wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that veteran general, after all his efforts to try to remedy the error in those guns!
But the general was quite human. He was not the "strafing" kind.
"I know those guns have an error!" he said, as he put his hand on the officer's arm. That was all; and that was a good deal to the officer. Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.
Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target. "Right on!"
And again and again—right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.